Posts by Pascal Monett

UK Supreme Court snubs Assange anti-extradition bid

I'd really like that downfall to be done with and not hear about this asshole any more.

Doom comes to the Pi Pico

I salute this achievement

I don't have the chops to do this kind of thing, but I'm knowledgeable enough to imagine the effort it must have been.

A well-deserved beer for this success ->

Europe advances crypto-coin regulation – without potential ban on Bitcoin

It is absolutely not

"It is like trying to ban the internet because it takes up 70 percent of phone line bandwidth."

The phone line takes a ridiculously small amount of energy compared to the amount of data being transferred. This is a strawman argument without any basis in reality, but I expect no less from someone purporting to defend the best method criminals have to whitewash their ill-gotten gains.

Banning crypto would put paid to many, many pyramid schemes and other scammer attemps to make an easy buck. I'm not saying crypto is only used by criminals, but when criminals have massively adopted something and use it so successfully, there might be a good reason to put a serious crimp on it.

Ukraine's nuclear plants: Chernobyl off diesel power, explosions explained

Good news

Let's just hope that Putin's stormtroopers don't start shelling nuclear power plants again.

Icon because whew !

The right to repairable broadband befits a supposedly critical utility

Where I live, in France, I use Orange for my Internet/TV/landline connection needs. Orange owns the backbone and everything up to my house. If I have a problem, there is no finger-pointing to be done, it's all Orange's responsibility from start to finish.

That is why I have no intention of leaving Orange for SFR, as SFR regularly asks me to.

If I did that, then I would be right smack in the middle of the same problem you had, SFR saying that it's Orange's fault and Orange saying the reverse.

I've been there before, I have no intention of going there again.

Salesforce sued in attempt to block release of Capitol riot info

Re: All parties

Don't worry, I'm pretty sure that, if ever the Democrats get accused of some horrible crime against Democracy, the Republicans will be all over it and subpeona everyone and their dog to get the dirt.

Republicans are very respectful of legal procedure when it's a case of bashing the Dems, much less so when it's their turn to be bashed.

It's called hypocrisy, and it is shameful when you are supposed to represent The People.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine tears open political rift between cybercriminals

"claims of Western warmongering"

I'm sorry, remind me of who's tanks have invaded a sovereign nation again ?

The Pravda spouting misinformation and outright lies is par for the course, for hackers it's just them trying to gain the high moral ground.

You were attacking us before Putin invaded Ukraine, and you'll be attacking us whatever happens after.

You're always attacking us anyway, so taking a lie to paint yourself in a good light is just laughably pathetic.

MongoDB to terminate Russian SaaS accounts

"a website he says will allow anyone to donate cryptocurrency to Ukraine"

What is this madness about funny money ?

Has Ukraine also been thrown out of SWIFT ?

Can't he post IBAN references for transferring actual money instead ?

Driver in Uber's self-driving car death goes on trial, says she feels 'betrayed'

"I feel betrayed in a way,"

Well your victim is dead.

Who is worse off, again ?

Cry me a river. I was never on your side. You were THE DRIVER.

YOU were responsible.

It's time to own up to that.

114 billion transistors, one big meh. Apple's M1 Ultra wake-up call

Let's have this conversation again when you've grown up . . .

The honeymoon is over

Our love affair with IT is over, we're in slippers now in front of the stream and it's all humdrum from now on.

I remember buying my first VooDoo 2, my first GeForce 2, my first Athlon Thunderbird.

Heady times.

Now ? Yeah, I upgraded my PC for the first time since ten years ago. Yeah, it works fine. No, I'm not going to benchmark it.

That's where we're at : IT is now a tool, IT is no longer anything special.

Sorry.

Russia labels Meta an 'extremist' organization, bans Instagram

Good luck finding a wat to do that, unfortunately.

Prototype app outperforms and outlasts outsourced production version

"Or written a temporary bit of code that ended up becoming too permanent?"

Oh I have, and I'm fairly certain that many, many people on this forum have as well.

I have bits of code running in several major companies in Luxembourg since 1998. I've got a "backup" ftp process piping data into a mainframe that was supposed to be decommissioned in 2015. There are some more bits and pieces I could mention, but mostly I can say that whatever code I have put in place likely only got replaced when the customer shut down the Domino server for the last time.

Afraid of the big bad Linux desktop? Zorin 16.1 is here

What ?

No Torrent link for the free version ?

On a Linux distribution ?

What are they thinking ?

The long-term strategy behind IBM's Red Hat purchase

"nowadays we have zero of those conversations"

Yeah, especially since AWS and Azure have paved the way for you.

UK, EU regulators probe Google and Meta's 'Jedi Blue' ad deal

The pole

Tie both CEOs to it and flog them for fourty lashes.

Come back every month with the same treatment.

Let's see how long they last . . .

UK Home Office dangles £20m for national gun licence database system

To think

A Domino R12 server with a dedicated application that would take me three weeks to implement, and can have thousands of clients replicating without trouble and ensure proper access only to those who need it.

I'll just take £1 million, and your thanks.

Of course it is. £5 puny million.

Dido doesn't get up in the morning if she can't waste £100 million these days.

BOFH: Gaming rig for your home office? Yeah right

Re: 3D cards

So it was an early BYOH environment ?

I remember a time in the late 90s when my team "stress tested" the network with Quake 3 during the noon lunch hour.

We were very diligent in our testing ;)

Re: It's time to kill the dragon!

Three months to get a proper login ?

Look, I've got a lot of Minecraft to do and my job actually requires work. Where can I sign up ?

The Human Genome Project will tell us who to support at Eurovision

Now that is one hell of a tale

Given that a "simple" paternity test costs €74, the fact that a DNA history test costs less is, to me, rather laughable, but let us pass on that detail.

What is hilarious (from the outside), is police including a swab-packing working in a list of suspects.

Well, it must have been a lot less fun for her the day the cops showed up convinced that she was a serial killer.

Somebody should make a TV film out of that.

Alleged REvil suspect extradited on ransomware spree charges

Re: Illegal tactics and due process

"the tactics used by USA prosecutors/FBI/NSA are largely considered illegal"

Citation please ?

I know a few people who, brainwashed by the contant stream of police/FBI series pumped into their TVs on a weekly basis, actually believe that they cannot be arrested unless they have heard their rights read to them.

Precision : I live in France. I'm not aware that the French police have that requirement.

Another point : the number of people who I have discussions with who genuinely believe that they have the right to one phone call during the interrogation process.

What I mean to say is that the entire world (well, in places where people have the luxury of television and the time to watch it) are likely quite attuned to the US criminal process. Of course, the people I talk to are generally not people who have been arrested, so the sample size is not entirely representative of the global population.

Finally, this guy was extradited to the US. I do believe that the tactics used will be perfectly fine in a US court.

Three Chinese web giants create streaming video 'standard'

"Western nations [..] have explicitly stated they wish to dominate standards processes"

Good luck with that. Thanks to the belligerence of the Trump presidency, China has been forced to up its game on the IT side of things.

Things are going to go either of two ways, in my mind. If the current standards bodies play nice and treat China as an equal (and why not ? It's not proprietary, hidden stuff, it's all out in the open), then China will likely play nice and all standards will actually be standard in the world.

The other option is for China to manage its own standards and only use our Western standards when selling products to us. That will fracture the market, although I have no idea what the consequences would be.

Analysis of leaked Conti files blows lid off ransomware gang

Re: Check out Brian Krebs excellent multi-part discussion on Conti

A very interesting read. Thank you for that link.

Toshiba's top investors signal strident opposition to planned two-way split

Re: What would happen if...

I don't think they can pull their investment. I think the only thing they can do is sell their shares.

But I may be wrong.

New Windows 11 build boasts inbox updates and UI tweaks

"The idea, it seems, has never really gone away"

Of course not. Borkzilla has had so few ideas that it keeps trying to shoehorn the ones it has had into everything it churns out.

Microsoft introduces pay-as-you-go tier for Power Apps

"The change means that [..] customers only pay for what they actually use"

No. What it actually means is that customers have no more control over their budget.

But hey, no problem. The board will find out soon enough.

Reg reader rages over Virgin Media's email password policy

"we continually invest in our security systems to keep our customers safe online"

We are currently spending all of our Y2K budget on this question.

Sony Interactive Entertainment pulls PlayStation from Russia

"the minister has continued to write to more tech companies"

Um, doesn't he have a war to manage ?

Why Nvidia sees a future in software and services: Recurring revenue

Funny how all the big guys think they can turn their hardware into a subscription service

Well they can't. If I'm paying upwards of €15000 for a vehicle, that vehicle is mine and mine for life.

If you think I'll be paying monthly for the right to drive my property I've got a bridge to sell you.

It has an additional per-usage fee as well.

Ukraine invasion: This may be the quiet before the cyber-storm, IT staff warned

"it's probably best to have a plan in place than lapse into complacency and cynicism"

Indeed it is. And it has been for the past ten years at least. And a majority of companies still have nothing in place.

Frankly, I'd be surprised to know that a majority of companies have a proper data backup system (that has been tested).

It should be a given that large companies with a dedicated IT department should indeed be prepared, but malware doesn't pay attention to the size of the network it is attacking, it just attacks anything it can. So small and medium-sized companies are equally at risk - but they don't put the same effort into their IT budget because they're putting all their efforts into gaining market share and satisfying the customer.

Like hospitals, who put all their effort into taking care of people (thankfully). They come down hard when hit by some despicable miscreant, but they don't have the resources to implement proper protection.

I'm starting to think that the only solution for hospitals is to mandate an impenetrable air gap between hospital computers and the Internet, but I have no idea how feasible that is in reality.

Biden issues Executive Order to tame digital currencies

Re: People don't tend to like hyperinflation

But if BitCoin's valuation fluctuates by 40% from one day to the next, that is no problem.

There is a fourth argument about funny money : it can be stolen just like real money. And I don't mean by thieves pilfering your account, I mean by the very "institutions" you put your wallet in to be managed. There is an already non-negligeable list of exchanges that have mysteriously folded, taking all coins with them, or management has fled, taking all coins with them, or coins have been lost due to insufficient security (or somebody took the coins with them).

For my part, thank you but I prefer proper management by a fully-chartered bank that has the legal obligation of managing my account properly and executing the transactions I demand faithfully.

And I prefer not to have to pay €20 in transaction fees when I buy a €14 pizza.

Ukraine invasion: We should consider internet sanctions, says ICANN ex-CEO

Now that I can get behind

Aim for military resources and treat them like spam while leaving all Ivan Ivanovitch's alone. Nice idea, I like it.

US warns Chinese chipmakers: Sell to Russia, suffer Huawei's fate

I don't like it, but I think you're right.

Driverless car first: Chinese biz recalls faulty AI

It would be easy to mock them

However, given that we don't have an open-source Vehicle AI, it means that every company currently developing a vehicle AI (and there are quite a few) is doing so on its own, in the dark, and not sharing information (because valuable IP).

That necessarily means that they are all the test-until-it-works bandwagon, and some faults are not easy to detect immediately.

Which means that recalls are inevitable.

So good on Pony.ai for doing the right thing, whatever the PR cost.

In my book, they're more serious than Tesla.

Dell opts out of Microsoft's Pluton security for Windows

Borkzilla is all about DRM

Brave takes the spring out of creepy bounce tracking

"Say a website embeds a third-party script from info.tracker"

Say I'm using Firefox with NoScript.

Problem solved.

Or say that I'm blocking info.tracker's IP address at the firewall.

Problem solved again.

But I'm happy that there are people who are thinking about the deep mechanics of ad tracking. The more ways we have to block that, the better.

UK govt signs IT contracts 'without understanding' the needs

"signing contracts [..] before it has a good understanding of the requirements"

I am shocked. Shocked, I tell you.

Cloudflare, Akamai: Why we're not pulling out of Russia

I think we should build a wall around Russia.

Somebody get Trump on this issue.

Re: The Mother of all Bombs

Funny that, isn't it ? Curious how there's a clear double standard in many things international.

Alphabet still can't kill off Google+ insecurity lawsuit

Don't forget : this lawsuit will not benefit Joe Public

The 500K people who's profiles were at risk get nothing from this.

It's just a circle jerk between Alphabet, its shareholders and the lawyers.

So, the only people benefitting from this in any way are the lawyers.

Again.

PsiQuantum envisions a datacenter-sized quantum computer

"you need a quantum interconnect that can send qubits from one chip to the other chip"

Hang on, isn't a quantum computer base on entanglement ? Why "send" qubits anywhere ?

The more I read about this, the less I understand.

Russia mulls making software piracy legal and patent licensing compulsory

Re: We're supposed to be mature adults

I wish we were.

DBAs massively over-provision Oracle to protect themselves: Microsoft

"But in the cloud – including Azure, natch – users can instead scale only when needed"

Yes, and then they can be hit over the head with the bill at the end of the month, bill that goes twice or ten times over their budget, but it's to late to plead at that point.

It has already been said by people far more intelligent than me : you do not save money by going to the cloud. It follow that you save even less by switching cloud.

It's snake oil, nothing more, nothing less.

Amazon cuts credit for charities to access web services

Re: Isn't this just bait'n'switch?

Isn't it interesting how it is always the megacorps raking money in by the tankerload who skimp at every opportunity ?

Re: So?

You need to improve your comprehension skills. Amazon is not offering £1000 to charities, it is offering half of what it had promised.

Not the same boat.

Customer service chatbot sector forecast to be worth $7bn this year

"LiveStory"

And the abomination has started. Soon, the more mentally fragile among us will be talking to their deceased loved ones on a screen, and shutting out the rest of the world to assuage their pain instead of learning to deal with it.

This company should be banned and shut down along with any other company that tries to do the same.

The psychological damage this will do will be uncalculable.

Enterprise IT finds itself in a war zone – with no script

"there's one shot at getting it right"

Oh, so we're going to fuck it up then.

We're back to WWI all over again. Nothing has been learned.

Except, this time, we have nukes.

Either we learn, or we disappear.

Russia acknowledges sanctions could hurt its tech companies

Re: time-warped back to the soviet era

Putin has never left the soviet era.

And, to be honest, we've never given him a reason to.